Surprise: 170-Year-Old Shipwrecked Beer Is Pretty Gross

Barrel-aging beers is certainly trendy these days, but letting the stuff marinate for nearly two centuries might be a bit too long even for the most diehard beer nerds. Nonetheless, some brave scientists have taken it upon themselves to sample and analyze beer that was discovered chilling at the bottom of a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea for 170 years.

According to LiveScience, "The bottles came from 165 feet (50 meters) below the surface of the Baltic, from the wreckage of a schooner that sank near Finland's Aland Islands in the 1840s." The findings included 150 bottles of Champagne and five bottles of beer; the boozy bounty was brought ashore in 2010, but scientists didn't publish their findings until just last month.

Upon tasting the beers, the scientists discovered "a ripe mixture of smells: yeast extract, dimethyl sulfide (think cabbage), Bakelite (a fishy smelling retro plastic), burnt rubber, over-ripe cheese, goat and sulfur," says LiveScience. For those eager to get a taste of 170-year-old beer, Finnish brewery Stallhagen brewed a limited-edition replica beer meant to mimic the shipwrecked brew last year — minus the spoiled goat-y notes, thankfully.